Speaker Pelosi's Hearing Problem

September 10, 2019

By Tony Perkins

It's not every day that you see the GOP caucus conducting business in the House visitors center. But today wasn't just any day. It wasn't just a defining moment for the Republican party but the Democratic party as well. For the first time in years, the House minority held a pro-life hearing in open defiance of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). They'd tried to schedule the event through regular order -- but the answer was the same as the other 80 times they asked Democrats to help them stop infanticide: No.

Even when House liberals refused to give them a committee room, Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) wasn't deterred. His party would have held the event in the basement if it meant more Americans would finally know the truth about the killing of newborn babies. "One of the things you don't really appreciate until you're here," Congressman Ron Estes (R-Kans.) told me on Monday's "Washington Watch," "is how much power the Speaker controls over what items get to the floor." This was "a struggle," he insisted. "Not only would [Democrats] not schedule a hearing, but they wouldn't allow us to have a hearing room," Estes explained. "But we're pushing forward."

If Speaker Pelosi and company want to pretend that perfectly healthy infants aren't being slaughtered in the name of "personal choice," that's her decision. But conservatives aren't playing along. These are real human lives hanging in the balance -- and this afternoon, listening to one chilling story after another, even Democrats couldn't ignore it.

"I am one of the lucky ones," Melissa Ohden wrote in an emotional appeal, "to not only survive an abortion, but to have someone fight to save me. But no one should have had to fight for me. They should have been expected and mandated to do so." Most unborn babies are scalded by saline solution in the womb for three days during an abortion. Melissa, the medical records show, was poisoned for five. She wasn't supposed to live -- not through the procedure, and certainly not through the complications of surviving it.

But survive she did. "I'm alive today," she says, "because life-saving medical care was right down the hallway for me -- once someone decided they couldn't leave me to die." Not everyone, nurse Jill Stanek knows, is so lucky. During her time at Christ Hospital in Illinois, she heard and experienced countless horror stories of babies with beating hearts left to die, abandoned in dirty laundry rooms, or lying cold and naked on the medical scales. With gut-wrenching clarity, she describes moms screaming for someone to help their babies when they survived. She remembers the excruciating moments when women realized their little children didn't have the physical deformities their doctor had warned them about. And realizing, too late, that they were perfect.

So many mothers, she shakes her head, had no idea their babies might be aborted alive. One woman was beside herself to see that her tiny son wasn't just breathing, but that he didn't have the disability she'd aborted him for. A nurse "rushed to call a neonatologist... But after the neonatologist examined the baby, he said that there was nothing he could do... [T]he little guy had been born too early. The mother was so traumatized that my friend had to give her a tranquilizer. The baby had to be held by his grandmother for the half hour that he lived."

The refrain from the nurses was the same. "I can't stop thinking about it," they told Jill when another infant was left to die. And it's no wonder. The nightmare was so common that the Chicago Sun-Times estimated "between 10 percent and 20 percent" of aborted babies "survive for short periods." That means an hour, Jill insists, maybe two. Plenty of time, everyone knows, to save them.

But Democrats like Governor Ralph Northam (Va.) and Speaker Pelosi aren't interested in saving lives. They're interested in keeping them "comfortable." Maybe that's why the governor's words hit Jill so hard. She's seen the lengths people take to dull their consciences. Now, instead of taking babies with beating hearts to a soiled utility room to die, they take them to the "Comfort Room," complete with a "First Foto machine in case parents wanted pictures of their aborted babies, baptismal supplies if parents wanted their aborted babies baptized, and a foot printer and baby bracelets if parents wanted keepsakes of their aborted babies." At her hospital, there was even a special chair to rock the newborns to death. "How far will doctors go to comfort themselves for letting abortion survivors die?" she asks. "Pretty far."

How far will America go? That's up to Democrats. Republicans have asked every single day for Speaker Pelosi to at least let the House have an up-or-down vote on protecting innocent survivors like Melissa. They refuse, even as 70 percent of their own party begs them to reconsider. "You see in the media," Whip Scalise told our listeners Monday, "they're trying to act like this doesn't even happen. And yes, it does happen."

Now is the time to stand up and say, "Enough." Join FRC in calling on Speaker Pelosi to put politics aside and remember who we are as a nation. If you have a Democratic representative, call them, email them, even visit them. Remind them that the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is more than just another piece of legislation. It's our future.

If you want to see just how much is at stake in this debate, don't miss this year's Values Voter Summit. You'll hear the emotional stories of the real-life abortion survivors, including Melissa. The Left says they don't exist. This event will prove them wrong. Register to join us in Washington, D.C. from October 11-13 today.

Tony Perkins's Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

Pop Tarts and Pop Gender

September 10, 2019

By Tony Perkins

It's tough to predict the weather, but not so hard to predict the media. What started as a little cloud cover over the president's hurricane tweet has turned into a Category 5 storm in the press. And it shows no signs of blowing over.

"It's unbelievable," the Federalist's Mollie Hemmingway shook her head. When President Trump suggested that Dorian might hit Alabama -- and didn't -- the mainstream media pounced, using it as a hammer to pound home their usual taunts. "Trump's trashing of the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] is part of his war on science," the Los Angeles Times's insisted. The bashing across the major networks was so overwhelming that people probably started to wonder what the real story was: families losing their homes or the around-the-clock trashing of Trump.

"As people die, CNN and other media outlets are focusing on what, exactly?" Mollie asked. "You almost get the feeling that the media decided at the beginning of the week, they were going to make Trump's handling of the hurricane a major story... This is such a minor point," she argued, "...it does not deserve seven days of coverage, 24 hours, hundreds of stories, front-page news." Finally, on Friday, NOAA released a statement saying that public information between August 28 and September "demonstrated tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama."

Even experts have trouble forecasting a storm's path. To say that the president is "anti-science" because he -- a non-meteorologist -- couldn't prophesy where the hurricane would hit is a pathetic fight for his opponents to pick. Especially, as many of us would point out, based on the Left's flat-out denial of real science about gender, creation, conception, and medical research. Unlike conservatives, the president's opponents are so ideologically-driven that they'll ignore decades of technology just to deny that an unborn baby is a human being -- or that gender is defined by biology at birth. This is the party who insists on dumping millions of taxpayer money into unethical scientific experiments while the rest of the medical community has moved on to cutting-edge cures that are already helping real people. And we're anti-science?

Just look at the disastrous effect the Left's lies are having children. One of their leading "experts" is bragging about recruiting 1,000 kids into transgenderism by comparing their gender to a pop tart. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an associate professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, is being lauded by extremists for advocating life-altering cross-sex hormones for eight-year-olds. Third-graders.

"I support a social transition for a kid who is in distress and needs to live in a different way," Olson-Kennedy explained to Reuters. "And I do so because I am very focused on what the child needs at that time." That's interesting, pediatricians like Dr. Michelle Cretella point out, since the last thing a child "needs" is to be pushed into a lifestyle with higher suicide risks, mental and physical health risks, and emotional trauma. The agenda is so devastating to kids that the American College of Pediatricians considers it "child abuse."

What legitimate medical professional would not only suggest, but encourage, little children to take drugs that can cause "decreased bone mineralization... increased risk of obesity and testicular cancer in boys, and an unknown impact upon psychological and cognitive development?" These are permanent effects to a very temporary confusion, as even the American Psychological Association's Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology admits. While less political organizations put the numbers even higher, the APA concedes that "75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress."

But instead of looking at the facts, Olson-Kennedy is taking her cues from toaster pastries. When one of her young patients was struggling with his gender, she remembers she asked him, "'Do you ever eat Pop Tarts?' And the kid was like, oh, of course. And I said, 'Well, you know how they come in that foil packet?' Yes. 'Well, what if there was a strawberry pop tart in a foil packet, in a box that said 'cinnamon Pop Tarts?' Is it a strawberry Pop Tart, or a cinnamon Pop Tart?' The kid's like, 'Duh! A strawberry Pop Tart.' And I was like, 'So...' And the kid turned to the mom and said, 'I think I'm a boy, and the girl's covering me up.'" It was "an amazing experience," Olson-Kennedy told her audience.

Less amazing, unfortunately, for the young boy -- who, like her other 999 guinea pigs, is probably still dealing with the fallout of playing pretend with the Left's "experts." Treating a person differently based on their feelings isn't just harmful, Cretella has warned. It's deadly. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a president who got the weather wrong than the well-being of millions of American kids.

Tony Perkins's Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

'It's Like a War Zone'

September 10, 2019

By Tony Perkins

The numbers are staggering, emergency crews say. The official Hurricane Dorian death toll in the Bahamas may be listed at 50, but experts warn that the number is about to skyrocket. Volunteers are still desperately trying to work their way through the rubble to find thousands of survivors, every second counting. The heart-wren
ching pleas are everywhere, even scribbled on wreckage, asking for missing children to call home. "It's like a war zone," said a Charleston volunteer soberly. "I shed some tears when I got here."

For the 70,000 people in the island nation, the tears are ongoing. They've lost their homes, and some, so much more. Cissie Lynch, Franklin Graham's daughter, joined me on radio Monday to update us on the latest from Samaritan's Purse, whose teams are already on the ground, building an emergency field hospital. But everything, Cissie said, is twice as difficult to do when you're working around collapsed houses and fallen trees. Unfortunately, I know from personal experience that the pictures we're getting back here in the states are just as devastating as they appear. Even then, the camera can't capture everything.

"The conditions are very rough, obviously... [and] it's hot. It's muggy. Just no electricity, no water, no food. But the hardest thing is the distribution of it. Like you said, these are islands... are the [toughest] ones to get to. So we have to work out of Freeport and Nassau and then take smaller planes or barges into the hardest hit areas." After working around the clock to set up a make-shift ICU and ER, the crew will see its first patients today.

If you've never experienced a natural disaster like this one, it's hard to put into words the helplessness and despair people begin to experience in the days after a storm. Having groups on the ground like Samaritan's Purse, who know exactly what needs to be done and can respond to it quickly -- with an encouraging word -- makes all the difference in the world.

When I asked Cissie what our listeners could do, she said the best thing was for people to go to the Samaritan's Purse website and social media pages for the most up-to-date information. Donate, if you can. And, most importantly, pray. "Obviously, at this stage, the best way to be involved is to pray. You know, the power of prayer. These people lost everything. Our staff will be on the ground for a long time with very harsh conditions."

We can all be part of the recovery efforts. Join FRC in lifting up the men and women of Samaritan's Purse as they deliver hope and healing to so many hurting people. Then, if you can, give or volunteer. The need is great -- but as we all know, God is greater.

Tony Perkins's Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.